User:Wnt/Joint statement/santorum
From WP:Arbitration/Requests/Case:
A mutually compatible point of view
I (User:Wnt) believe that the following points summarize the mutually compatible points of view of User:JoshuaZ, User:Macwhiz, User:Sadads, User:Orderinchaos, User:Will Beback, User:Wnt, User:Sandstein, User:Khazar, User:Jmh649, and User:Shell Kinney. They were summarized by me from a previous revision of this page where I sorted out all the Arbitration/Case statements by apparent viewpoint. My hope is that, after a few points are explained, modified, or dropped, we all can agree on a single common position. This may become a case in which it is necessary for the community to formally exercise its power to override ArbCom, and in order to do we need a core consensus to begin. Wnt (talk) 20:34, 13 June 2011 (UTC)
1. [We] don't think this is ripe for arbitration at this time.[JoshuaZ] There is an RFC underway that has yet to conclude, so not all steps in dispute resolution have failed yet. There's been longstanding community consensus to keep the article; it's survived three deletion discussions. An ARBCOM ruling now, short-circuiting the RFC, would seem premature.[Macwhiz]
2. As long as [people skewer politicians and other celebrities to gain favor or publicity], we're going to end up covering these kinds of issues. This doesn't mean we repeat these stunts as if they were fact (i.e. good editorial decision making and BLP), but we can explore the instances and their effects. Whether or not this term should be its own article or covered elsewhere and what navigation templates it should be in is purely a content decision.[Shell Kinney]
3. [We] note with dismay that (Sandstein's) concerns about the new arbitration policy about to be ratified, which enables the Arbitration Committee to make binding decisions about issues of content and governance rather than only about conduct issues, seem to be well-founded. So far, three arbitrators (Jclemens, Kirill and Newyorkbrad) have voted to accept a case apparently with a view to making a policy and/or content decision, that is, to influence how Wikipedia should cover the "santorum" neologism... The only acceptable way to address such content issues is through consensus-based processes as long as these remain functional, such as the ongoing RfC... The only issue that the Arbitration Committee can legitimately address is whether there has been user misconduct in the conflicts surrounding this matter, and if yes, how it should be sanctioned... The Committee should defer to community consensus (if any emerges) about whether the current article is policy-compliant or not.[Sandstein]
4. Why propagate the Streisand effect?[Jmh649]
5. [We] support retention of the santorum article in the reasoned belief that it is not an intentional attack on Santorum, but exists because Savage's attack on Santorum is unquestionably noteworthy and of encyclopedic value.[Macwhiz] Many respected news sources have linked to the page directly [1].[Wnt]
6. [Template:Sexual slang is not] making a libelous comment [or claim] about Rick Santorum.[JoshuaZ Assume for argument that it is a neologism; in that case, it's definitely a sexual one, so it's not unreasonable to add it to Template:Sexual slang. Consensus on that template's talk page was running 16:6 in favor of retaining santorum when Coren unilaterally decided to remove it, citing BLP. [2] Shortly thereafter, Coren removed it from Template:LGBT slang, with no prior talk page discussion, again citing BLP and referring to Template talk:Sexual slang. [3] Given the lack of consensus that Santorum (neologism) violates BLP, those edits trouble me, and I can't see community sanctions arising out of Cirt's edits there.[Macwhiz] How can one clearly and without error distinguish between listing an article in a category template because there is a reasonable belief that the article is a member of that category, as opposed to listing it to promote the use of a term documented in that article? The point of category templates is to increase the number of links. "Linking through hyperlinks is an important feature of Wikipedia." How does one know which articles are "bad" to link? How do we distinguish between promoting a term and promoting the article? If Cirt had added links to those templates for any other article, we wouldn't be here, but because it's santorum, there seems to be an assumption of ideological motivations. Can a link be a BLP violation, when the article is not?[Macwhiz]
7. Savage's "santorum" campaign has been discussed as a problem for his presidential campaign in ABC News,[4], Mother Jones[5], Rachel Maddow,[6] The Concord Monitor [7], CNN [8], Slate.com [9] [10], The Washington Post [11], The Village Voice [12], the Capitol Hill paper Roll Call [13], and CBS News [14] (the writer for which describes the Google Bomb as the primary reason Santorum's campaign is "widely considered a joke"). It's also been extensively referenced in the monologues of television hosts, the popular US humor programs The Daily Show and The Colbert Report, and dozens of blogs. It's clear that the genie is out of the bottle, with or without Wikipedia. I think there's room to reasonably disagree about how this content should be titled, framed, and balanced, as with any article. But I'm alarmed at the repeated suggestions that ArbCom should preempt or overrule an RfC to erase this content outright, or disguise the increasingly famous fact that Dan Savage coined a nasty neologism that's blocking a well-known ex-senator's presidential ambitions. Suppressing some or all coverage of a political candidate's widely-reported problems--no matter how sympathetic we may be to those problems--seems like a precedent that will cause problems in many future articles.[Khazar]
8. [Dan Savage related articles are not] a walled garden... they all have many incoming links and are all clearly reliably sourced.JoshuaZ
9. Cirt frequently produces a large number of articles of extremely high quality about a narrow subject.JoshuaZ Cirt is always very thorough in developing content in swaths related to whatever topic he is researching at the moment, and his activities seem to be well within the standard efforts for curation of Wikipedia content...[Sadads]
10. This article [is a very rare instance in which we see] the Senator's own response to [the neologism] - something which presented him in a significantly more mature light than the comments which sparked this off.[Orderinchaos]
11. [We are] sensitive to Wikipedia's press reputation,but it should not drive our policy decisions; that would be a reaction expected of a political, not academic, body.[Macwhiz]
12. Cleaning the article off the map doesn't solve anything. If anything it looks like coverup or censorship.[Sadads] [We] think there are some people who genuinely believe BLP should be about censorship, and that any negatives whatsoever must be avoided by Wikipedia. However, BLP basically means "cover it sanely and safely", not "don't cover it at all". It says as much itself: "Material about living persons added to any Wikipedia page must be written with the greatest care and attention to verifiability, neutrality, and avoiding original research."[Orderinchaos] Is what is written verifiable? Are the sources reliable? Is it NPOV? If not we have places to address that. If it is than move on. We do not need policies to "protect" people who say what they shouldn't have.[Jmh649] [We] cannot find any evidence that the content of [Santorum (neologism)] is either unverifiable, non-neutral or original research, even though the entire subject offends some people's sensibilities.[Orderinchaos]
13. Wikipedia [may be] "at risk of being abused for advocacy". But by making a strong community decision to include discussion of all reliable sources about well known politicians, we limit people to what the sources actually say. By contrast, if we allow the deletion of things people don't like, there is no bound to the distortion and whitewashing that can happen, as different groups of people try to blot things out.[Wnt]
14. I believe it is entirely wrong to criticize an editor for making "too many" edits, when those edits individually are appropriate. People should never lose rights because they registered for an account rather than contributing as a variable IP address. The decision of which articles to work on and what sources to look up and summarize is one of the few legitimate ways Wikipedians have to express their bias, and it underlies nearly every edit made to the encyclopedia. Scientists create articles about their favorite species and tools and concepts; nationalists write articles about their state parks and famous forefathers. And political supporters write the truth - when we're lucky - about their candidates and opponents.[Wnt]
15. If writing neutral, well-sourced articles becomes a cause for punishment then we might as well shut down this website.[Will Beback] If we are to use BLP to cover up this article or bend it to the will of some 3rd string candidate we can just shutter the place right now as we are no longer an encyclopedia. Either we allow sourced and vigorously edited content within the confines of our policy or we give it up. [Protonk]
16. There is another activism, another conspiracy, which doesn't seem to be receiving due discussion. Namely, we saw the campaign to stamp out this article, or greatly reduce it, or suppress all mention of it, start just a few days before Rick Santorum's announcement of his candidacy for the American presidency. I don't believe that's a coincidence, and it suggests that one or more people on the other side here is very closely tied in with Rick Santorum's organization.[Wnt] The nascent crush of interest in the article corresponds not with Dan Savage (who came up w/ the idea years ago) but with Rick Santorum's presidential campaign finding itself in the unenviable position of being ranked below a cruel joke played at the candidate's expense.[Protonk]
17. [We] think that Coren is demonstrating an assumption of pretty bad faith in his claims about Cirt and other editors.[JoshuaZ] Absent a clear reason to believe Cirt's edits were intentionally malicious, characterizing them as deliberately SEO or "egregious and vicious" seems unsupported.[Macwhiz] [We] would like to Assume good faith in Coren's actions, however, Coren's actions at Template_talk:Sexual_slang have been very aggressive and the comments have assumed deliberately malicious intentions by other users. His rhetoric has been very similar to several users who have overtly assumed bad faith of other editors, especially Cirt, in discussions related to Santorum (neologism).[Sadads]
18. [We] think there are other underlying reason for the escalation of the articles issues: users with vendettas against Cirt are forum shopping. The same group of editors have taken this controversy as an opportunity for forum shopping for the same issues, many of them in bad faith, at Jimbo's talk page, the various templates Cirt has created, ANI, AN, BLP noticeboard, Cirt's talk page, Wikipedia-en, even Did you know's talk (and now apparently ARBCOM requests about content issues [15]...). We have a concentrated group of editors that show up in opposition to Cirt's content in almost all of the conversations and connecting them, no matter what the position and what the consensus of other editors is (as far as [We] can tell, Jayan466, SlimVirgin and Off2riorob [and Coren...] are the most prominent). This has created a very large pool of people being drawn into discussions from all over the place, and finding their way to other areas and making decisions based on gut political opinions, misrepresentation of policies to meet certain ends and in defence against bad faith accusations (and these same gut opinions have led to edit warring). Recently, the conversations have all become focused on the talk page for Santorum (neologism), but some of the embers are still burning on some of the side arguments.[Sadads]
19. A year ago there was an AFD for a different politically oriented neologism that was coined to denigrate a living person, The Gore Effect. Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/The Gore Effect. Several of the editors who have posted here or elsewhere with strong condemnations of the "santorum" article took the opposite position on the "Gore Effect" article. Since BLP has not changed significantly it appears that some of the difference can be attributed to the political, scientific, or cultural biases of editors.[Will Beback]
20. Cirt has a standing interest in editing articles related to cults or new religious movements, including Scientology,[16] Rajneesh/Osho,[17] Twelve Tribes communities,[18], est,[19] etc. Several of the editors who have commented here have also edited those articles but from the opposite POV. There may some axe-grinding going on.[Will Beback]
21. In the straw poll on Talk:Santorum, nearly every Support vote mentioning Google considered the effect of having the article name and content on the Google results, while nearly every Oppose vote mentioning it was either unconcerned or skeptical that it had an effect. So who is using SEO?[Wnt]
The remainder of the comments from the Arbcom page have not yet been summarized; see a previous revision of this page where I sorted out all the Arbitration/Case statements by apparent viewpoint
Other discussions (as listed by User:Coren)
- The dispute has spread to multiple venues with no end in sight, and RFCs fail to reach anything resembling consensus. Amongst other, the dispute can be viewed on Talk:Santorum (neologism), User talk:Jimbo Wales, Template talk:Sexual slang.